The Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty

You may be aware that the Supreme Court has recently issued a judgment which significantly changes the legal approach to determining whether a person is deprived of their liberty. The judgement can be seen here A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland of a devolution issue under paragraph 34 o….

We would encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the judgment and carefully consider the implications for your services and practice. Please see the following links for further information: CQC statement on the Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty - Care Quality Commission and 2026-UKSC-16-Summary-for-website.pdf.

We ask that you refer to this updated position when making any new referrals to the DoLS team.  In addition, as the change came into effect immediately from 2 June, please review any recent DoLS referrals you have made. You should consider whether, in light of this revised approach, any of these referrals may no longer be appropriate.

We hope this offers reassurance whilst we wait for additional National guidance to be disseminated.  At this stage we don’t have further information, but if you have a specific query, you can contact the MCA DoLS Duty Team at Dolforms@essex.gov.uk

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Cost of Care Context

In April 2022 Essex County Council commissioned an independent specialist consultancy firm called LaingBuisson to support the delivery of our Cost of Care Exercise across Essex. This statutory requirement issued by Central Government primarily focused on domiciliary care providers for Adults over the age of 18 and residential and nursing providers for Adults over the age of 65.

The council submitted returns to Government on the 14th October 2022 which included our median rates from the cost of care exercise with our methodology and approach. Alongside this exercise a draft market sustainability plan has been developed to summarise our current domiciliary, residential and nursing markets, the potential impact of the social care reform and our next steps.

Since October 2022, the Council have been working to review the outcome of the Cost of Care exercise to ensure we have a robust cost of care rates. This also includes a review of our supported living and extra care markets.

In December 2022 the Council met with our Essex Care Association to provide high level feedback on our median rates and the potential impact to our markets as a result of implementing the Social Care Reform in October 2025.

 

Fair Cost of Care exercise outputs

The Council has a requirement to publish our “Annex B” reports. Annex B provides are the detailed approach, methodology and calculations to our median rates for residential, nursing and domiciliary care:

 

Market Sustainability Plan

As part of the Cost of Care exercise the Council is required to complete a Market Sustainability Plan (MSP) to support the outputs of the Fair Cost of Care exercise. The Market Sustainability Plan includes:

  • Current market position of our residential, nursing and domiciliary markets
  • The potential impact of the Social Care Reform (SCR) on our social care markets
  • Plans to address market sustainability within our residential, nursing and domiciliary markets over the next 3 years.

The final Market Sustainability Plan was approved at Cabinet on the 21st March 2023. This has been submitted to Central Government on the 27th March 2023. 

Last updated: 28/03/2023
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